make contributions of translations easier

[samuelstroschein]

Hi everyone,

You built a lot of tooling like auto-translations, etc. yourself. Inspiring to see as the project I maintain, inlang/inlang, strives to bring such tooling to everyone.

I am wondering whether the current state of inlang could already be of use for laravel. Contributors seem to be required to manually edit files or discussion are used to contribute translations https://github.com/Laravel-Lang/lang/discussions/1421. I could write a plugin that provides contributors with a UI for the translations in this repository, see https://inlang.com/editor/github.com/inlang/example for example.

There would be no overhead of maintainers or contributors as inlang is built on git. No accounts (login with GitHub), no sync, no pipelines are required. Contributions open a PR. More tools like the one you built in this repo will be part of inlang soon.

Would an UI over the translations in this repo be of benefit to the laravel community?

[andrey-helldar]

On the one hand, the mechanics of inlang is interesting and useful, but on the other hand, we will face many problems starting with the number of supported localizations - at the moment we have 78 of them.

Also, the other day we implemented a machine translation mechanism using Google Translate for untranslated keys. After that, anyone can easily translate any of the languages.

Another problem that an inlang project can face is line volume. The Laravel Lang project can support multiple versions of each package at the same time, so the final file has a fairly large volume of keys. For example locales/af/json.json. This file currently contains 1100 translation keys.

In addition, if a referent is assigned to one of the localizations, then the review code is assigned to it, because this person knows the language and can determine the correct application of grammar. When a person proposes a large enough amount of corrections, we can invite him to join our team. In the case of the inlang project, this behavior can be corrected, but how then will key translations come to the Laravel Lang project to pass the code review?

[andrey-helldar]

I will ask, but I do not promise that they will agree.

[caouecs]

the project is interesting but with the number of strings ;) we need to test I think

[samuelstroschein]

@caouecs I will open a test PR to see whether we are running into performance issues later today. Fingers crossed 🤞

[samuelstroschein]

Will do the PR tomorrow. Didn't get to it today

[samuelstroschein]

Alright, it's 4 am in Berlin. Finally got to test inlang with this repo.

Crossing our fingers did not help. The number of languages/strings crash Chrome. The cause is unknown (error 5 in Chrome). Choosing a subset of the languages works, see https://inlang.com/editor/github.com/samuelstroschein/lang. But, even if Chrome would not crash, the user experience would be ... improvable due to performance issues:

• Cloning the repo into the browser takes 3 minutes.
• Every commit will lead to a few seconds of loading time

The performance issues are aggregated under project #9.

While we are busy fixing the performance issues, which can take months as we are hacking git to be a backend (see the next git), how could inlang help laravel otherwise/feedback/ideas on what would make your and your communities easier with regards to localization?